Author Interviews

In this time of Darwinian economics, it’s an understatement to say that employment has become rather uncertain for many people. Nicholas Nigro’s No Job, No Prob: How to Pay Your Bills, Feed Your Mind, and Have a Blast When You’re Out of Workcan keep you from losing your mind if you happen to lose your paycheck.

It’s highly unlikely that if you are reading this you are unaware (or unappreciative) of American novelist Robert Stone. For what it’s worth, I rank Stone among a handful of living great American writers and have hungrily seized opportunities to chat with him.

"For a band that’s just starting out, it’s still fun and exciting and very Kerouacian to be in a van and touring the country. That’s the spirit I wanted for Audrey, and listening to that music definitely helped to infuse the book."

"I was just out driving in my car, and five totally different things came on–an old New Order song… a track from the new Portishead record… a Brian Eno Music for Films song… ‘Touch and Go’ by the Cars… and then this campy ’70s disco song called ‘Let’s All Chant.’ I love how this weird mix put me in five different moods within twenty minutes or so."

Although John Brandon is an MFA graduate of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis, while drafting the novel Arkansas, he “worked at a lumber mill, a windshield warehouse, a Coca-Cola distributor, and several small factories producing goods made of rubber and plastic.”

Leavitt’s latest novel is The Indian Clerk, a work of historical fiction about mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan that, according to The New Yorker, demonstrates “how the most meaningful relationships can defy both logic and imagination.”